This application claims the benefit of a Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-233224 filed Aug. 1, 2000, in the Japanese Patent Office, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to processing apparatuses, managing apparatuses, processing methods and storage media, and more particularly to a processing apparatus, a managing apparatus, a processing method and a computer-readable storage medium for controlling a boot of a computer.
When setting an operating environment of a computer which is typified by a personal computer, an operating system or an application program is installed independently at a stand-alone computer or from a server. Such a setting of the operating environment is made when setting up a new computer or an unrecoverable error or fault is generated in the computer.
When setting the operating environment in the above described manner with respect to a plurality of computers, it is necessary to repeat similar operations with respect to each of the computers, thereby putting an extremely large operation load on the user. In addition, in order to set the operating environment, a floppy disk which stores a system file is created, for example, and this floppy disk is used to boot the computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, for the purposes of reducing the operation load on the user, techniques have been proposed to prestore, in a server, a disk image of the computer in the form of a file. A client computer then requests the disk image file with respect to the server, and the disk image file which is received from the server via a network is developed in a disk drive such as a hard disk drive.
On the other hand, as is known in a PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) or the like, techniques have been proposed to register in advance a boot image, such as a system and an application program, in the server. When the power of the client computer is turned ON, the boot image is downloaded from the server via the network so as to boot the computer.
According to these proposed techniques, the boot image is downloaded from the server when booting the computer, and the disk image file is downloaded from the server using the application program included in the boot image, to thereby enable setting of the operating environment of the computer.
When employing the network boot function which boots the computer via the network as described above, one of the following two methods are conventionally employed.
A first method uses a boot image which is set for each client. In other words, the server presets boot images corresponding to each of the clients. On the other hand, the client makes a boot request with respect to the server when turning the power of the computer ON or when rebooting the computer. In response to this boot request, the server sends to the client which made the boot request the boot image which is preset with respect to this client. The client which receives the boot image from the server develops the boot image in a memory, and continues a process using the boot image.
A second method selects an image file which is to be used at the client. In other words, the server manages a plurality of disk image files, and sends a list of the managed disk image files to the client which makes a boot request. The list of the managed disk image files is displayed at the client which makes the boot request. When the selects a desired boot image from the list of the managed disk image files displayed at the client, a transfer request requesting the transfer of the desired boot image is sent from the client to the server. In response to this transfer request, the server sends the desired boot image to the client which made the transfer request. The client which receives the desired boot image from the server develops the desired boot image in a memory, and continues a process using the desired boot image.
By employing either one of the first and second methods described above, it is possible to reduce the operation load on the user when compared to the conventional techniques which do not use the network boot function. However, the following problems occur even by use of the network boot function.
According to the first method, the boot images corresponding to each of the clients are preset in the server. In other words, the correspondence of the clients and the corresponding boot images used by the clients are preset. For this reason, if an error exists in the boot image which is downloaded to the client and the application program included in the boot image is not started normally, the client computer may be rebooted to again download the set boot image, but the same error will be generated again. As a result, there was a problem in that it is impossible in such a case to carry out the operations such as booting the computer and setting the operating environment of the computer using the network boot function.
On the other hand, according to the second method, when rebooting the computer using the application program included in the boot image, the user must select the same boot image again when rebooting the computer.
Therefore, the conventional techniques used to control the boot of the computer were unable to sufficiently and considerably reduce the operation load on the user.